I saw Finding Nemo tonight with my friend, Phillip. It was really great. I laughed out loud several times and misted up a time or two. It might be my current favorite Pixar movie. That, or A Bug’s Life.
03
Jun 03
Anti-Zionist Orthodox Jews to Demonstrate at so-called Israel Day Parade
Via LibertyForum: Neturei Karta: Anti-Zionist Orthodox Jews to Demonstrate at so-called Israel Day Parade:
-
On Sunday, June 1, 2003 beginning at 11:15 am at 5th Ave. and 59th St. in Manhattan there will be a group of anti-Zionist Jews demonstrating against Zionism and the Zionist State that will be celebrated by marchers in their so-called Israel Day Parade.
The Anti-Zionist Orthodox Jews will proclaim their loyalty to pure Judaism and their opposition to Zionist heresy, which violates every principle of the Jewish religion. These people shall proclaim that the idolatrous Zionist ideology has no role in the life of an Orthodox Jew, and that Jews are obligated by Judaism to live in peace and harmony with every other people throughout the world, including of course, the native Palestinian People.
Pure Judaism proclaims that we are to accept the decree of Exile of G-d and live among the nations in every corner of the Earth, and are not to establish a State and attempt to end the divinely ordained Exile.
Pure Judaism forbids the uprooting of the indigenous people of the Holy Land, it proclaims its principles of humanity and justice that demands the total restoration of all human, civil, economic and political rights of the Palestinians, including the right of return of all Palestinians to their homes in historic Palestine, thereby enabling Palestine to be governed by its original native inhabitants.
These principles are essential ingredients of Judaism, and no amount of Zionism brainwashing of many Jews throughout the world and Zionist media propaganda can ever do away with these eternal principles. We declare to all non-Jews who believe that support for Zionist idolatry and ethnic cleansing demonstrates sympathy for the Jewish People that this is a grave error!!
We beseech all well-meaning non-Jews to understand the truth of what Judaism teaches, and we encourage our fellow Jews to resist the incessant hysterical and paranoia-filled propaganda of the Zionists, their heresy and their xenophobia, and learn the truth of what Judaism is and what Zionism is.
Those of us who oppose Zionism express true compassion for the Jewish People because we address the ROOT CAUSE of the suffering in the Holy Land inasmuch as Zionism is the cause of bloodshed in the Middle East and hatred of Jews throughout the world.
03
Jun 03
New Issue of Parameters
There is a new issue of Parameters, the quarterly journal of the US army war college, out now. It’s full of good reading.
01
Jun 03
Dream motifs
Last night I had a dream that my grandfather, Stanley, (we called him Pop-Pop) had somehow come back after being dead for almost twenty years. As he died when I was eleven this would be a very interesting happening. In my mind during the dream I guessed that maybe he hadn’t really died and had only been in a coma, but I also knew this wasn’t possible. I sat next to him on the couch and tried to soak it all in for as long as I could. He looked smaller than I remember, but at eleven I would’ve been a foot shorter at least.
It was nice to see him although I’m sure how I ‘saw’ him was very different even from how he used to look because my memories are very vague. I just knew it was him and it seemed like him. It felt almost like a visitation since he didn’t say much and I think we both knew he was really dead. I don’t remember what we talked about.
Shortly after my grandmother, Elizabeth, his wife, died a little more than a year ago, I had a dream that she was lying in a bed with the covers pulled up and we were talking. I was kneeling on the floor beside the bed. It seemed to me that we both knew she was visiting me after her death and that she was telling me something important. I think it was something about my brother.
Shortly after the funeral at her home, I remember my aunt describing a dream my grandmother had had shortly before her death. It was of an old woman placing a white dove in her hands. To me a dove could symbolize death or the soul. Maybe on some level she knew she was dying even though no one else had any inkling.
I’ve been thinking more about my grandfather lately. He seems to have come up in conversation more than normal regarding things I had not heard before. For instance, my mother told me recently that she was sure about marrying my father when she met my grandfather. She was impressed by the way he was so kind and the way he treated my grandmother. She assumed my father would be the same way.
In my dreams I feel like it is some glimpse of an afterlife, or at least, what it would be like. Everything in dreams is so indeterminate and I always feel so impassive and accepting of whatever happens. This is how I would imagine being a ghost or spirit: remote, impassive.
-
Ay, but to die, and go we know not where;
To lie in cold obstruction and to rot;
This sensible warm motion to become
A kneaded clod; and the delighted spirit
To bathe in fiery floods, or to reside
In thrilling region of thick-ribbed ice;
To be imprison’d in the viewless winds,
And blown with restless violence round about
The pendent world; or to be worse than worst
Of those that lawless and incertain thought
Imagine howling: ’tis too horrible!
The weariest and most loathed worldly life
That age, ache, penury and imprisonment
Can lay on nature is a paradise
To what we fear of death.
–Shakespeare
30
May 03
The cream of the crop: literally
Handsome men have the best sperm:
-
researchers showed that men with the healthiest, fastest sperm were rated as the most facially attractive by women.
The characteristics of a person’s face have long been regarded as an indicator of health. But this is the first direct evidence to suggest a man’s reproductive quality correlates with his facial characteristics, say the authors.
Maria Sancho-Navarro, a team member at the University of Valencia, Spain, said that symmetrical faces were rated as more attractive by the women. And other studies have shown that people with more symmetrical features are less likely to suffer ill health.
30
May 03
The Cream of the Crop
Most of these are from Antiwar.com:
- Suspect in Morocco Blast Dies
- Gulf Cooperation Council Considers Missile Defense System
- Lynches Say They Can’t Discuss POW Rescue:
-
PALESTINE, W.Va. – American POW Pfc. Jessica Lynch’s parents said Thursday they are not permitted to discuss details of their daughter’s capture and rescue in Iraq.
Greg and Deadra Lynch also said they couldn’t comment on media reports that dispute military information released on Lynch’s April 1 rescue from an Iraqi hospital.
- NYPress: John Ashcroft fears acid on his face, defends forced labor
- This brings up an interesting issue: how much control does the military have over an enlistee’s body? NYC reservist guilty of refusing to take anthrax vaccine
30
May 03
US Space Dominance
U.S. ‘negation’ policy in space raises concerns abroad:
-
COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo. — While much of the talk around the Pentagon these days focuses on “transformation” of the military, some of the United States’ closest allies worry about another buzzword being used in subtler ways at the National Reconnaissance Office: “negation.”
The nation’s largest intelligence agency by budget and in control of all U.S. spy satellites, NRO is talking openly with the U.S. Air Force Space Command about actively denying the use of space for intelligence purposes to any other nation at any time—not just adversaries, but even longtime allies, according to NRO director Peter Teets.
At the National Space Symposium in Colorado Springs in early April, Teets proposed that U.S. resources from military, civilian and commercial satellites be combined to provide “persistence in total situational awareness, for the benefit of this nation’s war fighters.” If allies don’t like the new paradigm of space dominance, said Air Force secretary James Roche, they’ll just have to learn to accept it. The allies, he told the symposium, will have “no veto power.”
28
May 03
Death Camps
The Courier Mail: US plans death camp:
-
THE US has floated plans to turn Guantanamo Bay into a death camp, with its own death row and execution chamber. Prisoners would be tried, convicted and executed without leaving its boundaries, without a jury and without right of appeal, The Mail on Sunday newspaper reported yesterday. The plans were revealed by Major-General Geoffrey Miller, who is in charge of 680 suspects from 43 countries, including two Australians. The suspects have been held at Camp Delta on Cuba without charge for 18 months. General Miller said building a death row was one plan. Another was to have a permanent jail, with possibly an execution chamber.